Many business, and other, entities make use of computer systems to provide many essential services and tasks, needed both for the internal entity operations as well as operations with respect to customers or clients of the entity. With decreasing computer and processing costs and increasing availability of new applications and services by way of computer systems, reliance upon computer systems shall likely increase.
When the business, or other, entity is large, the organization is likely to have a large number of computer workstations, configured in any of various manners, but generally in a conventional hosting configuration.
Advancements in computer-related technologies that provide for the decreasing costs and increasing availability of applications and services are, in part, permitted as a result of increasing processing and storage capabilities of computer devices. Many such computer devices, workstations and the like, have significant processing and storage capabilities that are under-utilized in conventional hosting configurations and arrangements.
Various schemes have been developed by which better to utilize the capabilities of the computer devices when networked, or otherwise connected, together. In one such scheme, so-called virtualization of the computer devices is implemented. And, when so-configured, the arrangement forms a virtualized environment.
In one exemplary virtualized arrangement, horizontal scaling is utilized. The functionality and processing capability of a low- and mid-tiered computer server, such as a Sun Microsystems Solaris 10™ T2000 server is, for example, used together with a zones functionality in which a computer server is divided into many zones, thereby permitting many applications to reside at the same computer server while appearing as though each application is running on its own server. That is to say, a server is divided into zones in which each zone acts as its own server, available to run an application tier. The aforementioned Solaris 10™ server is able to support up to a maximum of 8,192 zones. And, every server has a zone for each application. Use of horizontal scaling is particularly advantageous for transactional, real-time applications.
In another exemplary virtualization scheme, a grid computing scheme is utilized. In a grid computing scheme, batch related transactions are parsed so that the parsed pieces are able to be sent and executed in parallel on multiple servers. Once executed, parsed results are returned and combined. When implemented, e.g., by a Sun Microsystems N1™ Grid software, a grid engine is capable of executing a batch application. Server availability and readiness to execute an application piece is determined by agents that run on a server. By operating the batch job in parallel across multiple servers, the application is completed more quickly than if performed upon a single device.
In either of these exemplary virtualization schemes, as well as others, arrangement of a communication system pursuant to the selected virtualization scheme, provides for more efficient utilization of computer resources.
An entity that utilizes an existing, conventional computer system arrangement might well contemplate migration of the system to a virtualized arrangement, such as the aforementioned horizontally-scaled arrangement or grid arrangement. The viability of such a migration, however, is dependent upon the resources, e.g., costs associated with the migration or the time required to migrate to the new arrangement. To date, there generally has not been an adequate manner by which to quantify the viability of such a migration.
If a manner could be provided by which quantitatively to assess the viability of transformation of a conventional communication system arrangement into a virtualized communication system arrangement, better-informed decision of whether to migrate to the virtualized arrangement can be made.
It is in light of this background information related to computer system arrangements that the significant improvements of the present invention have evolved.